My column on Wyoming football coach Dave Christensen is in the Monday paper and here.

Here are additional comments from Christensen that didn’t make the column:

On feeling better about his decision to take over the play-calling after he and his wife, Susie, visited their second Arizona home during Wyoming’s spring break:

“Mike Holmgren has a house down there, too, and I always walk by it. Of course, he lives in a nice house and mine is the maid’s quarters compared to his, and I always had told my wife I never saw him. That day, he was with his wife on a walk, and I stopped him and had a great conversation. I told him who I was and he was familiar with my career, and I told him I was going back to calling plays, my first time as a head coach. He said he’d always called the plays and if you’re a play-caller, you always need to call the plays.”

On how he feels about the Cowboys heading into preseason practice:

“I feel good. I think we’ve made continued progress in building this program and adding personnel needs and depth that we haven’t had much of before. We particularly have more depth on offense. I think our kids are doing a tremendous job academically, too. Guys are graduating or are on track to graduate and we’ve had very few academic issues here. And I think our kids have done a tremendous job from a social responsibility standpoint. There have been two arrests in five years and they’re continuing to do a lot of community service work. The third part of the puzzle is the competitive excellence side of things and I think we’ve made progress there. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out if Brett Smith plays in the fourth quarter of four games last year, our record’s significantly different and we’re probably in three bowls in four years. . . I think we can be better in a lot of areas this year.”

On whether he feels this is “his” program now as he enters the fifth season:

“I think the players are 100 percent committed, they feel good about everything, and we’ve brought in every kid who’s in the program now. Our program’s in good shape right now. I think we’ve made progress. It was not easy. There were a lot of things to fix when I got here … It’s not the easiest place in the world to recruit to, but we want the right kind of kids to come here and I think we’ve got the right type. We’ve got good enough athletes that we can compete. We have some pretty good players here now.”

Following up, I mentioned this had been asked of every Wyoming coach … but how do you recruit to Laramie, such a unique collegiate setting?

“First and foremost, we try and find the right fit before we ever bring a kid in for a visit. It’s a unique individual that’s going to make it here, a guy who can handle the academic rigors that are here, who can live in a small community, who can handle drastic weather changes. We want to find a young man who can come here and who’s not going to have an issue with handling all the things that some kids can’t handle. I think we’ve done a good job of finding those guys and then we bring them on campus. It’s an easy sell after that. We have such great fan support, and administration and faculty, and a phenomenal support staff and coaching staff. . . I tell every recruit who comes in here, ‘If you need a nightclub, a big mall, or you need someone to entertain you, don’t come here.’ What we have is a great community, a safe community, zero crime rate, and a place where you can focus on things you go to college to do, which is get an education, be a great football player, develop relationships with your teammates and hopefully play in the postseason.

“We don’t try to mask things. I tell kids if distance and weather’s an issue, don’t come here. If you come here, the distance isn’t going to change and the weather isn’t going to change. We’ve found the best in our situation. We do team activities and we have great facilities. We’re one of the few programs in this league that have a full 120-yard indoor practice facility, and that’s where we go when the weather’s bad.

“We have a unique situation and a unique fan base here. A lot of people are longtime Wyoming people who are very passionate about it, they love their state, their university, everything we stand for.”

On whether the retention of Boise State and San Diego State in the Mountain West and the shoring up of the league helps the Cowboys:

“I think so. I think the way it’s divided up (into divisions), and to have a conference championship game, is good. Boise’s got a lead on everybody in this conference, so everybody’s trying to catch up with them. The good news is that there’s not 11 Boises and we’re trying to catch the other 11.”

On what he will have in mind while calling plays for junior quarterback Brett Smith:

“We don’t want to take his playmaking ability, his athleticism, away. We certainly know we want to have fewer hits on him. That’s going to be crucial. He’s a phenomenal playmaker. If the play is executed perfectly and he’s in the pocket and he makes a throw, he’s very capable of doing that. When he’s most dangerous is if it breaks down. He is a special athlete in space. . . We want to give him his freedom, but we want him to be more disciplined and with (new quarterbacks coach) Jason Gesser working with him, he’s gaining much better knowledge of reading defenses and going through progressions, under the concept and scope of what we’re trying to do.”

Terry Frei graduated from Wheat Ridge High School in the Denver area and has degrees in history and journalism from the University of Colorado-Boulder. He worked for the Rocky Mountain News while attending CU and joined the Post staff after graduation. He has also worked at the Oregonian in Portland, Ore., and The Sporting News. His seventh book, March 1939: Before the Madness, was issued in February 2014.